Date: October 11, 2026
Attendance: Brielle, Ivek the Seer, Ulfgar Kegbreath, Captain Gor
Four of them left Marin’s Hold at a grey dawn with winter on the air: Brielle, Ivek, Ulfgar and Captain Gor, steering by the folk tale from Mathilda’s cottage. At the ancient stone bridge over the river a freezing drizzle set in. On the bank lay broken flint-tipped spears, the leavings of cleaned fish and eel, and broad webbed footprints that came up out of the river and went back in; no boat had been dragged ashore. Under the arch someone had written in a script that was not Common and stacked stones into a shrine heaped with offerings, among them a little pile of mismatched old coins from many lands and eras. Ivek knew the bridge itself was held sacred. He prayed for safe passage and left a ration; Ulfgar poured a splash from his canteen. A strange calm settled on them, and for the rest of that day and night the sky behaved. Gor eyed the coins, thought about the weather, and left them.
West of the bridge the Fairy Path showed as a line of half-buried ancient tiles. Brielle, scouting, walked face-first into a web strung across some deadfall and saw beyond it great webs slung across the path, with a wrapped deer, antlers sticking out, among the catch. Gor reasoned that web-spinners wait rather than hunt, so they let them be and camped in a hidden nook among the fallen trees. Ulfgar’s snares took three hares; Gor’s attempt at stew came out a burnt grey paste. Next day they swung north around the spiders through deep, hilly, primeval forest. Ivek’s hare stew came out half raw. Ulfgar bedded them down inside a huge hollow tree, warm with rot.
In the night Brielle’s cans rang. When Ivek tried to grant her a vision of what was out there, he heard only a burbling laughter in his head. Brielle went for high ground, slipped on a loose stone, slid down a hillside and landed among five wolves. Her scream brought the others. Ivek’s blessing came through this time; Gor shot the largest wolf and Brielle put an arrow through its eye. One wolf dragged Brielle by the arm and another tore Ulfgar down; Ivek kept the priest alive with a vial of blessed water, Brielle cut the throat of the wolf that held her, and the last three fled. Gor salved Ulfgar, but nobody slept.
They spent the drizzling next day in camp. Gor butchered the wolves, keeping the alpha’s soft white winter pelt, and pounded much of the meat into pemmican. Ivek moved them into a hidden, sheltered thicket, Ulfgar poulticed his bites and cooked a genuinely delicious wolf-and-berry stew, and Brielle foraged beech nuts. From a treetop Ivek saw the Hangman’s Tree standing alone in a clearing to the southwest. Around the fire Brielle juggled daggers, Ulfgar retold the wolf fight to the people who had been in it, and the talk turned to the Count: once an honourable warrior who united a scattered, rebellious land under one banner and fell through his own pride, who now lures people into his realm out of centuries of boredom, and whose door into this world opens every year at Halloween. Gor went hunting and came back dragging a bull moose with a fine rack of antlers. They slept well and woke whole.
Next morning Gor butchered the moose, and they left what they could not carry at the edge of spider country as an offering to the Spider Queen. Brielle told exaggerated tales of the Fairy Path with a kernel of truth in them: village girls once heard a voice urging them onto the path; some vanished, but others came back years later as healers and herbalists, telling of the school in the woods; not all survived the training; and all of it was before these woods were called the Demonwood. With Ivek leading, they rejoined the path and reached the clearing. The forest fell silent around it. Bones lay under the tree and half-rotted bodies hung from its boughs on vines, not ropes. Beyond it the Fairy Path is lost. Brielle threw a stone into the branches and a huge red apple fell; Gor threw a moose haunch at the trunk and a vine whipped down, coiled round it and stripped the meat with tiny teeth. Gor then shot a rope-tied arrow into the apple and reeled it in. They left the tree standing and camped to the south in a dry hollow up a rocky hillside, reached by rope. Half the moose meat went mouldy before Gor could preserve it; Ivek, having watched Ulfgar, made a good stew of the rest.
Heading south, Brielle wandered off and came back covered in burrs, later slid down a muddy bank into a river, and blamed Gor for both. Near the river they found a box canyon in the forest. Brielle crawled to its lip and saw a spring feeding a stream through it, and its floor scattered with huge strange granite stones, polished cylinders and cubes, slabs crossed and stacked, all furred with moss. Gor reckoned them the leavings of an ancient river of ice: the Giant’s Playground. They camped above it rather than go down. Ulfgar foraged hazelnuts and blackberries; Brielle served rations on a plate garnished with chopped grass.
Next day they went around the canyon to the river and followed it west. Brielle found the same webbed footprints along the bank, going both ways, in and out of the water, and the track of a barrel rolled through the dirt. A little farther on she chased something shiny into the river and was swept away clinging to a log until Gor sank a rope-arrow into it and hauled her in. Then came the roar of water and a smell like blood: a waterfall that runs red as it pours over the cliff and fades to muddy brown below. Over the noise of it, they heard girls singing.